I will be moving out of the country soon, which meant going over and sorting pretty much every single thing I have owned in the last ten years. Among those things I came upon some of my old sketchbooks and thought this one in particular would be a nice addition to my website. Why? This old sketchbook dates somewhere from 2006-2008, and a lot of the sketches within either reference designs found in this blog directly or were the initial ideas for them.

Last week I attended the (now annual) Microsoft Tech Days Chile, a show set up by Microsoft to showcase their latest products to current and potential customers.

I went with an open mind, not sure what to expect. Chile is not, on a global scale, an important market when it comes to information technology or consumer electronics, hardly ever making the news in this regard. Probably the only time Chile has been featured on a tech news website such as Engadget was when Movistar Chile somehow managed to be first in the world to release then-new Blackberry Bold 9000 back in 2008. So I knew better than to expect from this show any announcements that might be relevant or meaningful on a grander scale. More likely it would be product demonstrations of products and services already up for sale, the whole event just a setup to play nice with potential local buyers. I really wanted to be all positive and cheerful about it all, figuring it would be worth it to at least get some hands-on time with Windows Phone 7 devices.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. And I just can’t turn a blind eye to the event’s many shortcomings. I’ll keep it short: Microsoft, it was dull. If you are expected to spend a whole day (or several) at a venue, it should be worth your time. I expect to garner information that I cannot easily find online. I expect the presenter to be more eloquent and well-versed than what I can find on YouTube. I expect interaction. And I expect the presentations to denote an extra effort. The delivery should be better than me looking at a website. Instead, I felt like I was being punished with PowerPoint presentations made back in the time of Windows 95.

The event was even more limited in scope than I had surmised. The displays set up by Microsoft’s partners (I’m looking at you, Lenovo and Nvidia) were dreadful. And that’s to say nothing of the organization. It all felt disjointed, unpolished and uncaring.

This I believe is one of the things that has cost you Microsoft so much defection to Apple.

I wish every company understood design as they do and followed this same mantra. I wish I could say that every consumer electronics item I own was conceived in a similar way. But unfortunately, it isn’t so. Admittedly, this is unlikely to be the most cost-effective way to go about things since it requires to actually stop and think and not just keep pushing products out of the production line. Then again, it should be the best received and most rewarding, we have had enoughexamples to know that consumers will acknowledge and appreciate with sales numbers and brand loyalty.